The Swimming Wizard

Ryan Woodruff
Head Coach
Lynchburg YMCA

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you will know that our Friday Fly workouts are some of my favorites to post.  This particular workout was one of our best fly sets ever.

We train in a SCM pool primarily.  The lanes are a bit narrow and we have about 20 swimmers in 5 lanes (really not bad from a space standpoint, but still hard to train fly with doing 1-arm strokes).  This set allowed us to swim fast repeatedly with out sacrificing stroke quality for safety.  We had 16 swimmers at practice, so I split the group into two squads of 8.  The first squad of 8 swimmers used 4 lanes (2 per lane going :05 apart so that swimmer 1 would still be kicking underwater when he or she passed swimmer 2) for a fly set and then moved into a single lane for the “recovery set.”  Then squad 2 would move into the 4 lanes and do their fly set.  Thus they alternated doing the fly set and the recovery set.

The groups were split not based on speed/distance orientation but more based on how well each swimmer holds his or her fly technique under fatigue.  Those whose technique tends to suffer under duress were in group 2.  Both groups were well challenged and nobody could complain about being in the “harder” group because both swam the same total distance butterfly.

We had some excellent performances, particularly on the 75s and 100s at the end.